A local team in the international XPRIZE Rainforest Competition recently held a tech demonstration at The Morton Arboretum, showcasing their tools and methods.
The team, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, is composed of experts in robotics, conservation, tree science, and genomics from Ilinois Tech, The Morton Arboretum, Purdue University, and Natural State.
What is the XPRIZE Rainforest competition?
“This is a five-year, $10 million prize to assess biodiversity in tropical rainforests,” said Matthew Spenko, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Tech.
The XPRIZE Rainforest Competition, launched in 2019, challenges experts across disciplines to develop technologies that monitor rainforest biodiversity rapidly and comprehensively. It began with 300 teams from 70 countries and narrowed down to 15 teams, which competed in Singapore for the semifinals in June 2023.
‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and five others advanced to the finals in the Amazon rainforest this past July.
“Essentially, we have 24 hours to remotely and as autonomously as possible, take data from a square kilometer of a remote rainforest and then we have 48 hours to assess that data,” said Spenko.
Tech demo at the Morton Arboretum
Last Friday, the team brought their tech to the Morton Arboretum to demonstrate their methods.
“The 24-hour data collection period is really about collecting bioacoustics. So audio data, camera trap data, and environmental DNA (eDNA) data. We do that by using a drone to deliver sensor packages to the tops of tree canopies,” said Spenko.
“Each one of those sensor packages then has those sensors on them or it can lower some of those sensors to different layers in the canopy. We drop those off in maybe the first four hours of the competition, and then we let them sit overnight, [and] collect the data. We come back the next morning and we pick those sensor packages back up,” said Spenko.
Once the data was collected, the team spent the next 48 hours analyzing the eDNA.
“With the air filter from the drone, what we did is we extracted DNA, and then we amplified them to make more copies of the DNA using a process known as PCR or polymerase chain reaction. Then we sequenced the data. From that, we will get this kind of diagram. So this will be the species that we discovered,” said Chai-Shian Kua, Senior Conservation Officer at the Morton Arboretum.
Methods to better understand global rainforest ecosystems
The team hopes to learn the competition’s results by next month. While winning the prize is motivating, they are equally driven by the goal of improving global understanding of rainforest ecosystems.
“I think that’s a big part of the competition and also our design philosophy is how do we not just build this for the competition, but build it for the people who are going to use it later. So a big idea of this is making it low cost, making it accessible, making it easy to use for non-scientists so that these local communities can use this technology to evaluate their environment,” said Spenko.
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